![]() ![]() ![]() The wiretaps are also time-consuming and expensive, as O’Keefe noted, requiring significant expenditures of manpower when prosecutors do get court permission.Ī federal database of state wiretaps granted by local judges around the country lists only 23 for Massachusetts in all of 2020, compared with New York, which ranked highest in the nation, with 250, or Colorado, with 105. And in each instance, prosecutors must convince a judge that the government has exhausted all other remedies. But as Public Safety and Security Secretary Terrence Reidy kept reminding the committee, no wiretaps called for in the bill can happen without judicial oversight. House Judiciary Committee chair Michael Day, who raised concerns about some of those changes during the hearing, said, “This is a balancing act between civil rights and civil liberties and providing law enforcement with the tools they need.” Several legislators and civil libertarians are raising the same old nightmare scenarios that have kept reforms to the law bottled up since Governor Bill Weld first attempted to change it in 1992. “The legislative inclusion of five words, ‘in connection with organized crime,’ means that electronic surveillance is unavailable to investigate and prosecute the hundreds of shootings and killings committed by street gangs in Massachusetts, which are among the most difficult crimes to solve and prosecute using more traditional means of investigation,’’ Gants wrote.īaker’s bill removes those five words, but would also bring the law into the 21st century, adding references to wireless, satellite, and cellular communications, and covering conversations with out-of-state participants involving a Massachusetts crime. ![]()
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